You’re now in a position where you’ve defined the key activities of a role and defined the outcomes you’d like to see produced from those activities. The next and possibly most critical step is to define exactly how these outcomes will be measured with quality Staff Performance Measures.
In the whole ‘how to manage staff’ equation, this area is both the most critical and (unfortunately – in most instances) the most difficult to establish. There are two broad categories of measure, being:
- Objective measures
- Subjective measures
Objective Staff Performance Measures are great, they’re black and white – numbers, statistics, facts, physical objects etc..
Subjective Staff Performance Measures are not so great. Typically they’re things like feedback from other staff members or customers, general observations, feelings and opinions. In most instances these do not make good measures (unless we’re specifically looking at results from, for example a customer survey), but sometimes they’re all we have for a relevant KPI.
Generally speaking you want to avoid the subjective measures as much as possible and stick with the firm objectivity of hard data and tangible output.
Good objective Staff Performance Measures are often easy to find within your existing reporting and management systems, for example your accounting software, service/production management systems and/or Customer Relationship Management software should be housing valuable information about where KPI’s are, or are not, being achieved.
It can be a tedious process identifying and setting up your reporting, but once it’s done you’ll be in a position to quickly and easily determine the performance of your people on a regular basis.
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